Crimes Stoppers Members Discuss Spring Break Issues

PANAMA CITY -- Spring break was the hot topic during Tuesday’s local Crime Stoppers meeting. Beach police told the group about this year's enforcement plans and the types of calls they’ve answered during this spring break season.

Authorities say arrests are on-par with the last few years. Drinking, shoplifting, fighting, public indecency; beach police say it's been a pretty typical spring break.

He laid out the arrests during this year's spring break period, along with the types of offenses. Wright says spring break is far more demanding than any other tourist season on Panama City beach.

"With today's spring breakers it is an influx of numbers and our beaches are very popular these days, a lot of different types of advertisements going out to advertise our beaches for spring break so obviously those numbers are going to be up,” said PCB Police Department Lt. Jamey Wright.

Wright has charts with recorded numbers of things like alcohol offenses and shoplifting from March 1st to April 2nd. For example the numbers of incident calls to the Panama City Beach police department during that time period was 9,631.

There are even peaks and valley during the spring break season itself.

"The second kind of two weeks of March is kind of when it started to slack down a little bit. That was because of just the different schools that are out, spring breakers going other places as well. But it definitely starts to slack down the later part of March but the numbers increase on the weekends for us,” said Wright.

Crime Stoppers members say the annual spring break report is helpful to their overall mission of helping local law enforcement fight crime.

“We try and keep people informed of what's going on and that's why we have this meeting today, kind of a follow-up report on this spring break and next year before we start spring break we'll start hitting it again,” said Crime Stoppers President Norm Gulkis.

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